Chapter 5 Essential Questions: Doorways to Understanding

“The important thing is not to stop questioning” Albert Einstein.

This chapter gives great importance to what we know is the beginning of any research: A question! But is it possible that a question can change the course of anything?

People who have made their own researches can tell the great importance of a proper question. So after writing about it, my question is: How do I make an essential question? Or maybe: How do I know that my question is really essential?

According to Wiggins and McTighe, an essential question leads people to big ideas by staying focused on goals - Let’s recall that we must always stick to the goals.

In my opinion, simple questions can lead students to answers, and teachers or researchers to great projects, as well as great and extremely well designed questions. The most important thing to consider is to be creative enough to make the best, most accurate question.

Teachers do not give answers to students. A teacher leads students to let them find their own answers.

Chapter 3

“There is no improvisation without practice” Jorge Drexler

Flexibility, experience, and creativity, may allow teachers to understand day by day, class by class the way students behave or react. People may change the way they behave, the way they think or they way they see things from one class to the other. This mean that what worked perfectly today, may not work in the same way tomorrow, or the explanation we give today may not be accurate for students of the same level but from a different class. The reason for this unfortunate situation is not students only (as you may be thinking), teachers also change. In the end, we are all people.

Teachers ought to be flexible to adapt to different students states. This means that the strategies prepared and thought from the beginning might be completely modified or adapted at the very moment of getting into to classroom - The goal remains in teachers mind. The job has to be done and the lesson has to be understood by at least most of students, no matter what! - Observation is the first step in the scientific method, not chosen randomly, but is obviously the first stage in analyzing a situation. Teachers’ creativity has been built by experience among other reasons, and it would be very helpful at that moment of despair, when at first sight, students’ class is a complete chaos – But it has to be remembered that the goal is above everything.

The teachers are not academically prepared to solve those kinds of issues (which unfortunately seem to be more common than we would like to) but the experience may give a teacher the tools for it -As the Uruguayan musician Jorge Drexler says: “there is no improvisation without practice”.

Finally, flexibility, experience and creativity would allow teachers to adapt to new and unexpected situations. But now new questions emerge into my mind: Do teachers have one goal in education only? And if that is so, what is more important. Teaching or educating?